.Net on the Android
I have seen forum questions regarding the ability to code for smart phones in .Net. Up until now only the Windows Phone supported .Net applications.
I have done some phone app programming for the Motorola phones using Eclipse and the Motorola SDKs. I remember the learning curve being a little steep because of the difference in the programming IDE and Java.For a Java developer it probably wouldn’t have been all that bad. But I had both IDE, Language, and the SDK and a different kind of Operating System that was limited for programming.
But now smart phones have more power than my first laptop, hey even my laptop of 5 years ago. The iPhone and Android operating systems are more powerful than their ancestors.
Novell thinks you should be able to use Visual Studio and .Net to program for any smart phone. They are pushing to port MONO into this space allowing .Net developers to use tools they have been using for other projects as well.
Can you imagine what this changes for companies with a distributed team. With the reduction in cost for 4G network access, we can literally write custom applications accessing our software from, well, any available cell tower.
Go check it out. Now you can code in Java or .Net…and maybe even share some codebase.
A Tester’s War Story
Today I’d like to talk about testing, a process impacting just about any system. Testing is always an issue for canned software deployments, Custom Software, Data Warehousing, ETL Processes, Packaging, Deployment; the list continues much longer than I have space to write.
First, a war story. Back in 1990 (something) I was leading a QA team for a custom Auto Auction system. We had a bug in the software funtion that was supposed to print out a gate pass so dealers could remove their vehicles from the sale.
The owner would use a self help kiosk where they could select their vehicle, provide credentials, request a gate pass, and out would pop a newly printed gate pass. It didn’t work.
We tried like the dickens to reproduce the bug. It just couldn’t be done. Finally, out of desperation I had our hardware staff provide us the components of the kiosk, computer and printers. Hey, what do you know? We found the bug in 2 minutes.
We couldn’t reproduce the bug on any other machine because we used a shared network printer. As soon as we tested using the special printer plugged into the parallel port we experienced the problem.
What’s the lesson here? The more closely your environment conforms to your production configuration the better your success will be in production situations. I have a couple more to share with you in future newsletters since I know this is a hard sell. What is the minimum investment we need in test facilities, personnel, hardware, etc? It seems to me we often have extremes.
Drop me a note with your War Stories or suggestions for testing configurations that are reasonable and complete. You can reach me at Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail me at btaylor@SSWUG.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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